Driveway and sidewalk clearing arranged in the county’s oldest and highest-income village, where Chapter 243 spells out the sidewalk rule more fully than any other code in Waukesha County.
Work in Elm Grove is carried out by an independent snow contractor under that contractor’s own name and insurance. The introduction is this site’s only part in it.
Elm Grove has the oldest housing stock of any municipality in Waukesha County. Its median year built is 1962; 62.3 percent of its 2,446 units date from 1950 to 1979 and another 20.3 percent are older than that, leaving four percent built since 2010 (ACS 2020–2024). Nothing here is a subdivision under construction. It is also the richest village in the county with a QuickFacts row — a median household income of $158,016, essentially tied with the Town of Delafield — and 88.5 percent of its households own their homes.
For a plow operator that combination means driveways and walks laid decades ago and a customer base that overwhelmingly signs for a season rather than a push. It also means a search result crowded with template lead-generation pages that swap the village name into the same paragraph. This page is not that.
Elm Grove’s sidewalk chapter is the fullest in the county, and it is worth reading section by section because each one changes what a contract has to cover.
| Section | What it says |
|---|---|
| § 243-13 | Owners shall “keep such sidewalk free from snow and ice” within “24 hours after the termination of any snowfall,” across “the entire width of the sidewalk.” |
| § 243-15 | Snow from private property “shall not be deposited onto any fire hydrant, mailbox … paved right-of-way, public sidewalk, or other public place.” |
| § 243-16 | The village may clear it and “charge the cost thereof against the abutting property each time”; unpaid, the charge becomes “a tax upon the premises.” |
| § 243-17 | Penalty under the village’s general penalty section, § 1-16. |
Two things are not in the code and are not printed here: the dollar rate the village charges when it clears a walk, and the village’s overnight-parking and snow-emergency rules, which were unreachable at the time of research. “The entire width” is the clause that matters for a quote. A snowblower pass down the middle of a five-foot walk does not satisfy it; a corner lot has two frontages of it. What a sidewalk line in a contract should say.
No NWS storm report in the research names Elm Grove, and there is no normals station in the village. The nearest measurements are a few miles away in each direction. On January 12–13, 2024 the gauge northwest of Brookfield read 16.0 inches and the one southeast of Butler read 14.1, while Greendale in Milwaukee County got 11.0. In the March 9–10, 2023 storm Brookfield measured 8.8 inches. Elm Grove is a short drive from both gauges.
For a season, the county’s reference is the Waukesha station: 39.5 inches a year on the 1991–2020 normals, with 13.6 days of an inch or more and 4.7 days of three or more. That is nine inches less than the airport’s 48.7 and the same number of plowable days, because the lakefront’s extra inches arrive in storms that add depth rather than new plow visits, and because early- and late-season snow that turns to rain at the shore stays snow here.
§ 243-15 rules out the hydrant, the mailbox, the walk and the right-of-way, which on a mature Elm Grove lot leaves the lawn on either side of the driveway and not much else. Full basements are universal in this county — the Uniform Dwelling Code puts footings 48 inches down — and a pile stacked against a foundation or over an egress-window well drains into the basement on the first of Milwaukee’s 53 freeze-thaw cycles a year. A pile stacked on the apron gets buried again by the village plow. The contract should name the spot before the first storm, and the driveway should be staked before the ground freezes in November.
The berm across the apron is the other thing to settle in advance. No village or county page in this market says the windrow left by a municipal plow is the homeowner’s, and none says it is not; a seasonal contract either includes a return pass or it does not. Why the return pass is the line to read twice.
No Elm Grove operator publishes a rate. The county’s one printed residential price is a Waukesha operator’s $49 a visit, good only inside the City of Waukesha and only on asphalt; against a normal winter’s 13.6 plowable days it works out to about $670 before any salt. An Elm Grove seasonal quote will be built on the driveway, the sidewalk under § 243-13, and the return pass, and it should be compared to that arithmetic rather than to a national aggregator’s “from” figure. Operators here book seasonal customers early; one Waukesha company posted that it was full for the season before the season began. Every published number, and who published it.
Nearby: Brookfield · New Berlin · Butler
Say whether the sidewalk is in scope and whether the lot is a corner; both change the price under Chapter 243.
Call (262) 333-0458 Get a Seasonal Quote
Waukesha County